Demon Seed
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Movie Reviews of Demon Seed
Movie Review: Ignore the trashy title, this is an intelligent scary thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
With a title like Demon Seed, you would most likely expect a horror movie to be a cheap, exploitative son-of-the-devil piece of drive-in garbage. However, Donald Cammell's Demon Seed, based on the novel by Dean Koontz is anything but. It is an extraordinarly well-made, intelligent and thoroughly suspenseful thriller. Anything involving computers is naturally going to be dated as soon as it hits the screen, so the concept of an enormous supercomputer that has a built-in "dialogue room" seems a bit silly nowadays. But this was perfectly appropriate for 1977.
In the movie, scientist Dr. Alex Harris heads up a team that has created the ultimate supercomputer. A machine that is essentially an artifical brain, completely capable of thinking and reasoning. It is so smart in fact that in four days it single-handedly develops a cure for leukemia. However, as we all know from a century of science fiction stories, disaster is on the horizon. Before long, the computer gets to be too smart. Its brain gets to be too complex to be confined inside an electronic box. Being a hyperintelligent supercomputer, it devises a solution. It must procreate with a human and its child will be free to experience the world, hands on. The computer eyes Dr. Harris' wife, played by Julie Christie, and forces her to be the carrier of its "demon seed".
It sounds trashy, but the film is thoroughly intelligent, believable and quite scary. The computer, Proteus IV, is an evil monster that makes HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey look friendly in comparison. Demon Seed is always suspenseful, terrifying and yet another disturbing reminder of why technology is not always as great as it seems. This is a great sci-fi/horror thriller that I highly recommend.
Movie Review: HAL Makes A Booty Call
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't be misled by the film's title - this is no horror film featuring the spawn of Satan. The ineptly titled Demon Seed is actually a sci-fi thriller with shades of Kubrick and a hearty dose of technophobia.
Julie Christie stars as a pampered housewife who's marriage with her scientist husband, Alex, is on the rocks. When he's not tinkering with robots or wiring their whole house to a centralized computer, Alex is working for the government on his latest project - PROTEUS. A "living computer", PROTEUS is designed to think, learn and evolve, eventually computing the solutions for all of mankind's ills.
Of course, PROTEUS has other plans. When Alex moves out (nowadays this is called a "trial separation") he inadvertently leaves a console running in the house. PROTEUS enters like a Trojan Horse, quickly putting the house's myriad electronics under his control. Christie, who slowly but surely notices that something is amiss, becomes the target of PROTEUS's worldly desires - but not in the creepy way you're thinking. Oh wait - actually in exactly that way. PROTEUS intends to impregnate Christie with his child, ensuring that he will live on free of the "box" that binds him. What ensues is a fantastic showdown between the strength of the human will and the cold hard algorithms of logic.
The film can be viewed both as a cautionary tale of technology's potential power over its creators, as well as a philosophical pondering of the nature and meaning of existence. A great, and often overlooked, bit of cinema from a time when technology could still be regarded with great suspicion.
Movie Review: Terrifying, thought-provoking, sexy and unnerving!
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw this film when I was in my teens and thought it was interesting and disturbing,all at once. I revisited it again in my 30's and I still love it and appreciate it even more now, given my increased ability to understand its themes.
The film explores a fine line between technological innovation and complete robotic intrusion and replacement of human emotion. There are several scenes such as that, where the machine almost is "offended" by Susan's character's "mockery" of having a child. The other is when Susan looks at the child at the end, knowing that she must carry out the task of being a mother, despite the disturbing and unsettling circumstances. The film's philisophical debate of how and why a machine can spontaneously become self-aware, has been explored in many films before and after, but this one, given its time period, claustophobic and horrifying scenes, use of sound, and that horrific voice of "Proteus" achieves a blend of psychological horror rarely seen. The film makers have effectively grappled on screen, with Koontz's concepts of where humanity ends and machine begins. The other interesting idea is how the husband reacts to this child; his obsession in creating and advancing this technology has trumped any kind of anger, jealousy and outrage. The being must be preserved given the risk and work that has been expended on the project. Proteus itself chooses when and where to stop functioning, effectively taking the power away from its makers, and through the forced preservation of the child ends up triumphing. Very interesting film-definitely recommended.
Movie Review: A.I. (Artificial Inseminator)...
Summary: 5 Stars
We've finally done it. We've created a computer that can learn and make it's own decisions. Just imagine the global problems to be solved, the diseases to be cured, the trillions of dollars to be made! We'll call our invention Proteus, yes, that's a great name for it. What? Proteus has it's own secret agenda? One that has nothing to do with the well-being of mankind? Uh-oh. DEMON SEED is an eerie 70s sci-fi chiller that still manages to make me shudder. Susan Harris (the utterly beautiful Julie Christie from Don't Look Now) is trapped in her own fully automated home by Proteus, the mega-brain computer gone wild that has ideas involving procreation. Yep, old Proteus wants offspring. Susan fights to keep her robo-virginity to no avail, as Proteus is extremely determined to do the business! With all of the deep, romantic emotion of a rough gynocological exam, Proteus sets out to woo Susan by force. Meanwhile, her estranged husband (Fritz Weaver from Creepshow) and creator of Proteus attempts to reason w/ this techno-terror. Wonderful stuff! Buy immediately...Movie Review: A (To the ((Needle)) Point) Review
Summary: 5 Stars
If anyone cares to see a film that set a bar so high that few dared to parallel, I highly recommend "Demon Seed," from 1977.
Yes younglings, it's older than many of you and your parents, but this film not only made a computer a central part of the home in nearly every way, which is finally being realized these past few years, but the artificial intelligence went to far as to create an offspring of flesh an blood by artificially inseminating an unwilling subject.
Yes, there are no SUPER COOL graphics which will blow you away. Occasionally the pace of the editing makes you wonder when the next scene will been seen. And since it was made in 1977, the dialogue can be dated.
BUT...
After you peel away the layer of what you think you can expect, you will come to realize that "Demon Seed" crosses boundaries yet to be established. And if it doesn't leave you unsettled, then you too must be a computer!